David Scotthttps://davidscottmusic.co.uk
songwriter. broadcaster. lecturerTue, 12 Dec 2017 08:43:27 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/421a29c7a5bea559cc6c20b422eff390?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngDavid Scotthttps://davidscottmusic.co.uk
The Pearlfishers: Sugar Mountain Babieshttps://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/08/02/the-pearlfishers-sugar-mountain-babies/
https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/08/02/the-pearlfishers-sugar-mountain-babies/#commentsSun, 02 Aug 2015 09:14:15 +0000http://davidscottmusic.co.uk/?p=520]]> Sugar Mountain Babies first appeared on The Strange Underworld of the Tall Poppies in 1997. This was the first time that a live string quartet appeared on a Pearlfishers recording thereby setting the tone for everything that followed. When we re-released The Strange Underworld of the Tall Poppies on vinyl we made this little film that hopefully captures some of the sweetness in the song. A fox falls in love with a deer: baby chickens ensue. It can happen.]]>https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/08/02/the-pearlfishers-sugar-mountain-babies/feed/2IMG_4959davidscottprojectsDavid Scott: I Just See The Rainbowhttps://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/08/02/david-scott-i-just-see-the-rainbow/
https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/08/02/david-scott-i-just-see-the-rainbow/#commentsSun, 02 Aug 2015 09:00:14 +0000http://davidscottmusic.co.uk/?p=515]]>Live performance for the BBC at the Quay sessions with the story of how ‘I Just See The Rainbow‘ came to be…]]>https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/08/02/david-scott-i-just-see-the-rainbow/feed/2IMG_4981davidscottprojectsThe Umbrellas of Shibuyahttps://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/08/02/the-umbrellas-of-shibuya/
https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/08/02/the-umbrellas-of-shibuya/#commentsSun, 02 Aug 2015 08:48:30 +0000http://davidscottmusic.co.uk/?p=511]]>David Scott: The Umbrellas of Shibuya

From BBC Music at The Quay summer 2015

]]>https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/08/02/the-umbrellas-of-shibuya/feed/1David Scott: BBC Pacific QuaydavidscottprojectsThe Pearlfishers: The Last Days of Septemberhttps://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/02/08/the-pearlfishers-the-last-days-of-september/
https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/02/08/the-pearlfishers-the-last-days-of-september/#commentsSun, 08 Feb 2015 18:00:12 +0000http://davidscottmusic.co.uk/?p=495]]> This film takes you an a short journey around a dream-state Falkirk with Alan Davie murals, Italian cafes, a Cattle Tryst…

From The Pearlfishers ‘Open Up Your Colouring Book’ album.

]]>https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/02/08/the-pearlfishers-the-last-days-of-september/feed/9IMG_3300davidscottprojectsPaper Lifetime Guaranteeshttps://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/02/04/paper-lifetime-guarantees/
https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/02/04/paper-lifetime-guarantees/#commentsWed, 04 Feb 2015 13:40:41 +0000http://davidscottmusic.co.uk/?p=487]]>I wrote this song with Amy Allison back in the days when collaborating on songs over email seemed like a vaguely innovative act. This and other songs we made ended up on an album called Turn Like The World Does in 2012, still available from all good dealers of MP3s the internet over and still a personal favourite of mine. When I was asked to do BBC’s Another Country Songwriters In The Round at Celtic Connections 2015 this was first on my list. Hope you enjoy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AelGoWvpFkA&feature=youtu.be]]>https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2015/02/04/paper-lifetime-guarantees/feed/4p02hk03b-1davidscottprojectsNew Music: Poundstore Riot & Rowan Rosshttps://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2014/11/15/new-music-poundstore-riot-rowan-ross/
https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2014/11/15/new-music-poundstore-riot-rowan-ross/#commentsSat, 15 Nov 2014 17:39:37 +0000http://davidscottmusic.co.uk/?p=488]]>On the occasions I’m asked what might be required of those who desire a career in what is now typically referred to as the music industries plural I tend to invoke the name of a guy I first met as a baby faced 20-something drummer named Stuart Kidd. Still baby faced but well over the hill now (he’s 34), Stuart is the epitome of the excited, engaged and committed renaissance indie popster, equally at home teaching drums, running community music projects, writing and recording better then better again music with The Wellgreen or touring with a range of artists from Euros Childs to Super Furry Animals offshoot Gulp. I’m lucky that one of his many activities is singing and playing the 6-string acoustic guitar with my own Pearlfishers. So there you go, I’ve declared a personal interest, M’lud. I promise that I will drool over his music in a non-biased, ethical way.

‘The Kidd’ seems to make a new album of one kind or another every four or five weeks and the newest of these, recorded under the moniker Poundstore Riot, is a highlight. His partner this time is Welsh musician Ash Cooke aka Pulco, ex of Derrero, collaborator with John Cale and many others. Together they have fashioned a rambunctiously unpredictable, sweet and idiosyncratic gem. A concept album about writing and recording songs then releasing them as a concept album, Writing The Wrongs (Folkwit) kicks off with a blink-and you’ll-miss-it California chorale before giving way to the image of Stuart Kidd with a broken drum strapped to his bike heading off to Bobby’s Basement to lay down some music secretly dedicated to Bobby’s sister, shuffling her feet in the room above. But while this unnamed siren is the main squeeze of Track 2, the true love interest (and narrative core) of the album is the act of home recording itself. The Joy of Fostex if you will. Sounds like a recipe for worldwide chart domination, right? Ah, well, they’ve still time to make their Thriller and the music here is so beautifully realised, so sincere and so full of great melody that it’s easy to forget you’re basically listening to some geezer crooning about sourcing vintage music gear on Ebay. Musicians will sagely nod their heads at the lovely narrative recounted in Green (‘I saw you onstage, lunchtime for charity, I was happy to pay, at the door for 50p’), a stunning sonic summit conducted in the afterlife between Gram Parsons and All Things Must Pass-era George Harrison, while non-musicians will scratch their heads at the equally lovely spoken word History Of Home Fi. And it is the natural tendency of Writing The Wrongs to shift shape, to throw curveballs that finds its finest form in the one-two punch of Roll Tape and Poundstore Riot. The former is a laugh-out-loud spoken word piece recounting Kidd and Cooke’s attempts to buy cut-price CD cases and the latter an exhilarating Stooges-meets-Dinosaur Jnr take on the ensuing Stella-fuelled chaos (there is an entertaining fictional hinterland for this in the form of the Poundstore Riot press release) that neatly encapsulates the freshness, surprise and joy of music made in-the-moment just for the joy of making music in-the-moment.

I wrote about Rowan Ross around this time last year and he returns with indecent haste proffering a new album, which I hungrily accept. Where Kidd and Cooke conceptualise the act of using a Portastudio, Ross conceptualises the state of existence that Brian Wilson once described as being akin to a cork on the ocean, a rock in a landslide or a leaf on a windy day. Fireflight is shot through with the image of the Artist in negotiation with the Universe, most clearly in the opening Heavy Rain where a mythical old man shows a pessimistic singer the liberating power of nature’s dark side and leads him dancing away into a shower of impressionistic, clattering cymbal, glockenspiel and marimba.

Mythical creatures are all around in the world that follows; the fisherman cursed to spend eternal nights on the ocean in Perfect Catch replete with swooning vocal / cello canon and the eponymous Character Actor who storms into town to audition for a play and alternately flatters, taunts and hi-fiddle-de-dees those who use the greasepaint and lanterns to ‘focus their fears’. Alongside these half-hour episodes smaller sketches thrive too and Willow, a simple goodbye lit in late-Autumn marimba and melancholy soprano vocal interludes, is a magical, glowing highlight. The use of a limited sonic palette is effective throughout and the bedrock of acoustic guitar, upright bass, marimba and piano provides a warm cradle for the occasional burst of fire provided by Ross’s own inventive and melodic fiddle playing. There are beautiful colours cast by additional musicians with honourable mention for Rick Standley (upright bass) and Calum Scott (drums, percussion) who understand the tunes and the stories and, I’m sure, the singer. And of course it does come back to the singer; whether cast as the actuarial reckoner of Talk Of The Town or the Chet Baker channelling crooner of the circular Happy Hunting Ground, Fireflight is the work of a singular and authentic voice who understands how to write a great tune and seizes the right moment to take you and I down some unexpected paths. The closing title track finds the Artist finally at one with his nemesis, the Universe, expressing peace and hope with a melody fit to bless the darkest, rainiest night.

There are times when members of the human race can astonish and surprise, when the pure power and energy of the spirit rises to face down the harshest demons. If you think that a rather hyperbolic opening for a blog post please feel free to find the extraordinary, often distressing and ultimately inspiring story of Scottish singer/songwriter Jess Ryan in some of Janice Burns’ pieces for the Daily Record.

Earlier in the year my colleagues at the University of the West of Scotland supported the recording of a single by Jess, which has just been released for download here. She wrote the song, ‘How Would You Know’, in tribute to the charity Children First who had been a crucial support in Jess’s own journey from the dark into the light. The song is simple, stark, honest and most incredibly, given its genesis, positive and thankful. The arrangement, by Jess and UWS 4th year student Stuart Edgar, perfectly serves the message of the song in the way that all good arrangement and production should. Having wondered for some time about the role of ‘executive producer’ I must confess to experimenting during the 2 day session by leaving the studio for hours at a time then returning with unreasonable demands that destroyed the flow of the work and caused extreme annoyance to the artists. Excellent fun. Best of all during Jess’s time with us was getting a sneak preview of her new songs. Seated at the piano in UWS Studio 1 she ran through several new works, all of which displayed an emerging maturity ripe for studio development.

In the meantime Jess Ryan continues her campaigning work for Children First. Please visit the Bandcamp page – downloads cost £1 with the money going to the charity. If you want to know more about the work of Children First here is a good place to start.

In the meantime enjoy this beautiful song, full of hope and reconciliation.

]]>https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2013/11/20/new-music-jess-ryan/feed/0UnknowndavidscottprojectsNew Music: Rowan Rosshttps://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2013/11/07/new-music-rowan-ross/
https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2013/11/07/new-music-rowan-ross/#commentsThu, 07 Nov 2013 20:32:24 +0000http://davidscottmusic.co.uk/?p=476]]>Years ago I was walking through Stirling town centre and was attracted by the sound of a young busker singing Smells Like Teen Spirit while accompanying himself on violin. Yes, you read that correctly, violin. His name as it now transpires was Rowan Ross.

There is a tradition in Scottish pop music of people taking a long time to get a record together. The Blue Nile developed a Fibonacci-like approach to this, as the gaps between successive albums multiplied exponentially. My old friend Edward O’Connor started his music career by forming a cool group called Punch in 1985 but only got round to releasing his debut album (under the banner The Trinity) 23 years later in 2008. The Feminine Sun Divine was most assuredly worth the wait but I could do with several more from Edward. We’re all waiting on a reformed Bay City Rollers album, probably produced by Kim Fowley, and knocking bubblegum pretenders worldwide for six, aren’t we? Okay, I took that too far, but you know what I mean.

I feel that Rowan Ross has been nursing some music for a long time and I’m very glad he is about to share. The first track from his forthcoming album Second Fiddle has just appeared with a lovely and simple film. There’s something of the McCartney here both in terms of the melody writing and in what Peter Maxwell Davies famously described as ‘generosity of spirit’. McCartney himself might describe the piece as ‘peopley’ and that’s what I love most about ‘Another Book’: the sense of inclusive, gentle reflection. Sometimes a song just needs to be a song rather than a sermon or a revolution or a question and the simplicity of this piece absolutely shines out. Verse Verse Chorus Verse Verse Chorus Chorus and thank you very much. It does veer worryingly close to j**z in the playout but redeems itself in terms of brevity. Thank you Rowan Ross.

The famous song The Windmills Of Your Mind, written by Michel Legrand with Alan and Marilyn Bergman is an example of a contemporary popular song built around a single visual image, that of a circle, married to a single musical phrase repeated and varied in numerous ways. A dynamic example of Art-Pop, the song marks a point in contemporary popular music where the possibilities of expression on one side of a black 7” plastic disc seemed potent and endless, and when schooled technique was thrillingly brought to bear on the free-for-all 1960s cultural group grope.

The Windmills Of Your Mind was written for the 1968 Norman Jewison film The Thomas Crown Affair and was sung by Noel Harrison over an iconic scene where bored playboy Steve McQueen pilots his glider over countryside, lost in thought, planning a strictly-for-thrills bank robbery. Marilyn Bergman recalls that director Jewison “wanted a song that exposed no character, that didn’t tell any plot – he just wanted the restlessness and uneasiness of the character underlined.” The circular image of the glider was paramount in the thoughts of Legrand and the Bergmans when they met to start work. Legrand quickly presented seven full melodies for consideration. The trio settled on a baroque styled ribbon of a melody, which not only reflected the flight of the glider but also reminded Marilyn Bergman of “those moments when you’re trying to fall asleep and you can’t turn your mind off”. To that she added the observation: “Anxiety is circular, actually”.(ASCAP, 2006)

In fact, everything in this song is circular. The first word we hear is:

Round

And immediately we’re taken through the labyrinth of the human mind. We’re swept down the mountain with a snowball, on a carousel of circular images, “like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel” as we go further into the mind of the character on screen, McQueen, silently gliding, lost and lost and lost. We might imagine ourselves, disembodied, looking down at a world which appears “like an apple whirling silently in space” on a journey at once inward and outward. The Bergman’s lyric, firmly rooted in its time, the 1960s, is quintessential art-pop, trying to convey something more than a shake of the hip and a curl of the lip. The Beatles experiments with narrative, notably Norwegian Wood and Eleanor Rigby, and the vast visions of Bob Dylan’s mid-sixties peak not only led their contemporaries out of the womb of Memphis and its 12 bars, but brought more traditionally schooled arrangers and composers into the body of their new church. No less a figure than Leonard Bernstein lauded the work of Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, specifically one of their ‘Teenage Symphonies to God’ – Surf’s Up.[1] A young composer named Jim Webb created widescreen impressions of America in orchestral miniatures like McArthur Park,The Yard Went On Forever and Wichita Lineman (another song notable for it’s use of melody to describe a visual image).[2] The late 1960s UK charts were home to curios like David McWilliams harpsichord drenched Days Of Pearly Spencer, Keith West’s Grocer Jack (from Mark Wirtz’s unreleased Teenage Opera) and Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale. Even 1950s rock and roller, Roy Orbison threw his hat into the ring with the ham-fisted Southbound Jericho Parkway. Suddenly a song had to be a movie, preferably over ten reels and in Technicolor.

One can imagine many a 1960s cultural pre-occupation lurking in the corners of The Windmills Of Your Mind. Might that be a melting Salvador Dali clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its “face”? The door, which “keeps revolving in a half forgotten dream” is another fashionably surrealistic image, the Hollow that leads to a “cavern where the sun has never shone” could be the same cave where Bilbo Baggins first encounters Gollum in the uber-60s novel-in-a-kaftan, The Hobbit. Another novelist beloved of 1960s artists is Edgar Allen Poe, and those are possibly his pictures “hanging in a hallway”, watching the watcher. Again the circular theme can be found.[3]

Various interpreters of the song have suggested everything from undertones of erotica, to “airily psychotic” connotations of “keys that jingle in your pocket, words that jangle in your head”. Still, others see it simply as deep and meaningless. Indeed the singer of the original version of the song, Noel Harrison (who had been photographed for the cover of his 1966 debut album sitting inside a fridge, reading Jean-Paul Sartre) bluntly asked Alan and Marilyn Bergman “What the hell’s this about, then?” There is evidence, too, that the authors, conservative by nature, have attempted a sackcloth and ashes apology for sins of over-creativity by rationalizing a conventional narrative out of their first inspirational gestures, perhaps to neatly tie up the song’s confused threads:

Lovers walk along the shore and leave their footprints in the sand

And later

When you knew that it was over you were suddenly aware
that the autumn leaves were turning to the colour of her hair

Female interpreters sometimes sing an alternative:

When you knew that it was over in the autumn of goodbyes

For a moment you could not recall the colour of his eyes

It isarguably a more heart-stopping, beautiful image; but, ironically, neither of these ‘conventional’ sections seems to ring as true as the over-wrought poetry which precedes. What ultimately marks The Windmills Of Your Mind out as an interesting lyric is not so much its layers of meaning, allegedly hidden depths or some imagined narrative; nor should the song be viewed as merely a museum piece (it has a rich copyright value to this day with many recordings in circulation and use by television advertisers). The lyric works because it sticks for the most part to that circular image so brilliantly described in Legrand’s melody, and in doing so combines poetic imagery with perfectly weighted musical expression to create a feeling which is by turns troubled and peacefully resigned – a recognisable state of humanity.

The melody of The Windmills Of Your Mind consists of one short phrase varied 14 times throughout the song with one sub-variation (the verse ending “like the circles that you find” and its own variation, “in the windmills of your mind”) and two brilliantly arresting twists – the disembodied opening exclamation; “round”, and a moment towards the end of the song where “the images unwind” and the melodic structure with them (probably a revision of the melody after completion of the lyric).[4]

The central, circular phrase consists of 14 quavers and 1 crotchet, which commences on, beat four of bar one and ends on beat three of bar three. With each new line the phrase modulates, morphs, varies, rises, falls and returns to the centre ground. This simple modulating technique is typical not only of Legrand, whose great songs in The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg along with What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life and The Summer Knows bear this signature mark, but of French pop music in general. She and Une Enfant are two Charles Aznavour songs which use the same trick. The composer Serge Gainsbourg rarely bothered to write more than a few new phrases before moving them around on the stave and changing the harmony underneath. Comment Te Dire Adieu and L’Anamour are two obvious examples of this. Gainsbourg took the classical connection one stage further, basing songs directly on works by Chopin, Beethoven and Grieg.[5]

If the trail-blazing Beatles were pushing the envelope of lyrical expression in the 1960s, they were also experimenting with an expanded sonic palette, courtesy not only of the technical innovations of the EMI Studio at Abbey Road but the influence of their spirit guide / interpreter George Martin. The group was less bound to the British revival of edgy Blues music than many of their rivals, in fact Lennon and McCartney’s travels to Paris in 1961 and their experiences of European culture in Hamburg served to cement their view of themselves as artists, so when George Martin played Ravel’s Daphnis And Chloe to a rapt McCartney he was preaching to the easily converted. The cultural space that opened for records like Macarthur Park and The Windmills Of Your Mind in the mid to late 1960s existed in no small part because of The Beatles pioneering bravery, however the progression they brought to popular music was in part achieved by going back into the traditions and formal disciplines of music.[6]

In The Windmills Of Your Mind, formal disciplines are perfectly brought to bear on meaning, and Legrand’s signature style reaches a peak of technical and emotional perfection. The constantly undulating landscape of his melody mirrors the confusion, the circular anxiety of the human mind, while conversely offering some kind of spiritual security – from the second line the listener is on home ground and by the third, fourth, fifth variation we are in the arms of the song, happy to trust each just-familiar melodic phrase. One can relax, step in and walk around the song until Legrand’s melody suddenly reaches outside the warm confines of the glider for the third, “airily psychotic” verse. This time the variations are more dramatic and minor in colour. We might imagine the glider starting to spin out a little, the air starting to rush, the blue becoming silver, the melody turning in on itself and the harmony straying out of its comfort zone. We land back on the opening “circle in a spiral” before Legrand’s melody stutters, breaks and extends its rhythmic phrasing (“as the images unwind, like the circles that you find”) as a film might spill out of a cinema projector and we find ourselves on home ground again.

The original recording of The Windmills Of Your Mind was produced by Jimmy Bowen, veteran of sessions by Glen Campbell, Frank Sinatra and others and was recorded live on the RCA soundstage in Hollywood with Michel Legrand conducting an arrangement which takes the circular image even further, with an introduction of swirling violins and flutes, numerous spiralling arpeggios in the background, variously played by violins and a piano. Jazzy, driving horns and low trombone or perhaps tuba darkly propel a tempo significantly faster than most of the subsequent versions of the song.[7] Like Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas, another song built largely on a single phrase, The Windmills Of Your Mind seems to intimidate many interpreters with the result that too much respect is shown, the tempo drags and the performance becomes self-conscious or over stated. No such problems existed for the original performer, gamely battling nerves on the soundstage alongside Legrand. Noel Harrison’s oddball vocal performance which recalls Anthony Newley’s cockney warble sits unusually high in the mix, heavily compressed and brightly reverbed, disconnected from the track in much the same way as the character in the song is disconnected from the earth, adrift, lost and lost and lost.

[2] Webb writes; “and the Wichita Lineman is still on the line”, moving upwards a full octave between “on” and “line” and suspending that note, literally in the air for four long bars.

[3] One idea for a Beatles movie had the musicians as characters in Tolkein’s The Lord Of The Rings.

[4] Legrand and the Bergmans, veterans of the songwriting business would certainly be tuned to deep layers of interaction between melody and lyric. The songs of Antonio Carlos Jobim often make lyrical comment on the melodies (“this is just a little samba built upon a single note” One Note Samba).

]]>https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2013/06/24/the-windmills/feed/6IMG_0079davidscottprojectsWan Singer Wan Song!https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2012/09/29/wan-singer-wan-song/
https://davidscottmusic.co.uk/2012/09/29/wan-singer-wan-song/#commentsSat, 29 Sep 2012 12:39:16 +0000http://davidscottmusic.co.uk/?p=453]]>The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang defines the expression ‘one singer one song’ as a call for order to those who “uninvited, join in a singer’s song and, inevitably, fail to add a pleasing harmony.” The Glaswegian version of the saying is the far more poetic, angular Wan Singer Wan Song! It is this that gave us the title for the first event of MA: Songwriting & Performance, which took place at University of the West of Scotland Ayr Campus on Friday 28th September.

The format of event was simple enough: play one of your songs that has meaning for you, talk about it for a couple of minutes and then let everyone else talk about it for a few minutes more. As an icebreaker and an introduction to the talents and spirit of those in the room it was pretty special. It is a truism of live performance that the smaller the audience is the more nerve wracking the experience tends to be for the performer; Wan Singer Wan Song! was open to participants of MA: Songwriting & Performance only, thus the audience at any given time was 12. But the special qualities of songs and their performers are often accentuated not only by the intimacy of surroundings but also by the manifest nerves of the performers themselves. Judy Collins recounts first introducing Leonard Cohen to an audience in 1968 and the singer getting to the middle of the first song before dropping his hands to his sides and declaiming, “I can’t go on!” (BBC, Omnibus, 1988) Collins continued, “and of course the audience went wild.” Good wild. Nobody resorted to such drama at Wan Singer Wan Song! but there were nerves and shyness and caginess and love for the common song all in equal measure and the effect of this song sharing was ultimately inspiring and moving. Among the highlights were Gerry Rafferty Scholar Andrew Howie’s beautiful rumination on 11 years of marriage, Barry MacLean’s surreal, stark run along the M8 from Glasgow to Stirling at 3 o’clock in the morning in his pyjamas and Yvonne Lyon’s Christmas / New Year blessing phoned in by CD because Yvonne was playing somewhere else to almost certainly a bigger audience. But I can honestly say that every song and every performance filled the room with gladness and promised much for the first delivery of this great project. Such was the collegiate support and the intimate level of discussion as to the meanings, origins and internal lives of songs that one very late addition to the MASP cohort, there to observe the proceedings, remarked later that the only word he could think of for the event was close.

MA: Songwriting & Performance moves next to a full week of songwriting and related activity on the Ayr Campus from 15th to 19th October, thereafter to a series of participatory arts events with various groups and in the New Year a series of performances under the Celtic Connections banner. Details here, there and everywhere as soon as I have them.